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What is the with the SteamOS fascination? I loaded it up on a HD and played around in it. It's about as useful an OS as the one that is on my BluRay player. Games and an awful full screen Web Browser. Why would you vastly limit what your PC can do for a console UI? It is madness.Reply

It's the same reason many of us run XBMCbuntu or similar distros that boot directly in to a HTPC frontend. We want a nice 10 foot UI built to act like an appliance. We have other PCs to use as full PCs, these are our lesser/spare/old PCs that we're using to fill a role. As long as they fill that role well nothing else matters.

That said, SteamOS is still Debian underneath and is about the easiest thing in the world to get to a pretty standard desktop. You can do anything you could do on any other Debian derivative, it just boots to a gaming-focused UI by default. Nothing is being "vastly limited".Reply

I played around with SteamOS for a bit, but lost interest quickly. You can still have a nice 10 foot UI with a regular PC. All my TVs and home theater are connected to fully capable Windows gaming machines that can either game on their own or Steam stream from my or my wife's main gaming rig. On top of that, you can load up Steam BPM, XBMC, Media Center, any browser of choice, or whatever else you want without being limited by an appliance. The appliance thing is great, but not if you need five appliances to do five different things.Reply

IT's designed to offer the stability and ease of use of consoles on PC; for gaming mostly. Biggest barrier to people becoming PC gamers is how complex it is, troubleshooting, mods, even graphics settings are more than many are willing to do. They just want plug and play functionality, not work or configuration. Steam Box is seeking to address that problem.

If people happen to start using them as media center's for the living room as well, all the better. Reply

Well, there goes all hope of it being reasonably priced. Hopefully they'll have an i5 or i3 version in the works, as an i7 is just a silly degree of overkill. I'd rather an i3 and either pocket the difference or ask them to stick an mSATA/M.2 SSD in there for caching.Reply